'Sex Drive' is only partly worth the trip

By Mark Olsen | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 17, 2008

If the title doesn't say it clearly enough, Sex Drive is about young men (mostly), young women (tangentially), cars and sex (or the lack thereof). Shot by cinematographer Tim Orr, the look of the film wavers between a startlingly natural, sunlit palate and a rather generic high-key gloss. That same tension, between conventionality and the unexpected, plays out across the film as a whole.

Directed by Sean Anders, the film is adapted by Anders and John Morris from the young adult novel All the Way by Andy Behrens, in which a young lad (Josh Zuckerman) makes a connection online with a girl in another state. Not wanting to head off to college a virgin, he swipes his older brother's muscle car, packs his two best friends along for the ride and is off in search of sex. In the broadest of contours the film is similar to the '80s chestnut The Sure Thing but it plays more like the randy, semi-sensitive anecdotal antics of a few entries in the American Pie series.

The teen comedies that are remembered tap into something fundamental about their time, and here Anders smartly finds a way for many of the characters' most embarrassing moments to be somehow caught on tape, which leads to a quick cutaway to a YouTube page or makeshift website, capturing how the anxieties of adolescence can now be stingingly spread like never before.

Touches like this keep Sex Drive from being just another run-of-the-mill teen comedy. Occasionally sharp but never quite as smartly formed as it could be, this Sex Drive is only partly worth the trip.